Posted on 03/17/2015 7:48:19 PM PDT by NYer
A severe solar storm smacked Earth with a surprisingly big geomagnetic jolt Tuesday, potentially affecting power grids and GPS tracking while pushing the colorful northern lights farther south, federal forecasters said.
So far no damage has been reported. Two blasts of magnetic plasma left the sun on Sunday, combined and arrived on Earth about 15 hours earlier and much stronger than expected, said Thomas Berger, director of the Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado.
This storm ranks a 4, called severe, on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's 1-to-5 scale for geomagnetic effects. It is the strongest solar storm to blast Earth since the fall of 2013. It's been nearly a decade since a level 5 storm, termed extreme, has hit Earth.
Forecasters figured it would come late Tuesday night into Wednesday morning; instead, it arrived just before 10 a.m. EDT. They had forecast it to be a level 1.
"It's significantly stronger than expected," Berger said. Forecasters had predicted a glancing blow instead of dead-on hit. Another theory is that the combination of the two storms made it worse, but it's too early to tell if that's so, he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
Crap.
:-\
Can't be. There are no SUV's or aerosol hairspray stuff on the sun, silly.
I’m over 250 miles south of you, and in only a moderately dark location, so, no luck...
However, spaceweather.com has some great pics up.
WaPo has some great pics and links to more, too:
Last night, my crazy dogs all went out and stared up at the sky, in unison.
There was nothing there that I could see.
I have never seen any of my dogs *ever* pay the night sky any mind.
Could they be sensing or “seeing” the storm?
They’re also going barking mad, randomly.
[and freakishly, I feel really *great*]
/I sing the body, electric ‘mander
*
Ah, but the sun is WHITE...or at least yellow, and you know they might as well be white ;)
Yes.
Forecasters figured it would come late Tuesday night into Wednesday morning; instead, it arrived just before 10 a.m. EDT. They had forecast it to be a level 1. It was a 4.
Why did they miss this so badly?
see! man made climate disruption is so bad, it’s effecting the northern lights!!
/sarc
Might be some good DXing.
Bush needs to be held accountable for this!
Yeah. What do they think they are? Climatologist?
I keep getting logged out though.
A few years ago I was at a Virginia Beach when all the electricity went out for 10 miles up and down the coast. I was astonished at how big and brilliant the stars looked with no light pollution. Has anyone heard about the Carrington Event, or something like that? A very big solar flare phenom, many many years ago.
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